Inside the exquisite Jaipur hotel-apartment of Marie-Anne Oudejans

The fashion star-turned interior designer has done up her Hotel Narain Niwas Palace apartment as a colourful fantasia

(Left) Marie-Anne Oudejans relaxes on the veranda in a tented daybed that she designed. The Gitto-fabric tablecloth is from Bar Palladio Jaipur’s homeware line; (Right) Potted plants shield the entrance to the designer's veranda

Dutch fashion designer Marie-Anne Oudejans never intended to live in India, or to become a decorator. But, she says, “Sometimes, you need an adventure.” So for the last seven years, Oudejans has resided in Jaipur, in a one-bedroom space at the romantic Hotel Narain Niwas Palace. She decorated her own rooms, as well as the apartment of French jewellery designer Marie-Hélène de Taillac, her long-time friend; the hotel’s quirky Bar Palladio Jaipur; and two outposts—in Mumbai (2015) and Jaipur (2017)—for Gem Palace.

Lucky draw

Canopied daybeds soar at decorator Marie-Anne Oudejans’s suite in Jaipur’s Hotel Narain Niwas Palace. The lanterns and Anglo-Indian-style sofas are custom-made; the paintings are by French designer Thierry Journo, who runs Idli, a fashion and art boutique in the city

Serendipity played a central role in Oudejans’s life change. Seven years ago, on a flight from Tokyo to Madrid, where she then lived, a fellow passenger asked, “Why don’t you go to India?” She thought, ‘Why not?’ Within months, she and her Border collie, Aedo, had moved to New Delhi. It was a bad fit: “Too large and too loud”. So Oudejans gave provincial Jaipur a try.

The sultan portraits in the bedroom are by artist Vikas Soni, who also painted the walls and ceiling

Oudejans, the genius behind the award-winning mid-1990s fashion line Tocca, which featured dresses made of saris, felt right at home. She moved into Narain Niwas, a former country villa built in 1928 by the Thakur of Kanota, a local nobleman, and settled into a ground-floor apartment that opens on to the pool and a lush tropical garden populated by peacocks, parrots and monkeys. “It’s a magical place,” she says.

One day, Marie-Hélène de Taillac—who splits her time between Jaipur and an apartment in Paris—was driving by Narain Niwas when she spied a chic woman “wearing a pencil skirt and a little fur jacket. She looked amazing,” she recalls. “Then I realized it was Marie-Anne.” Old pals who had worked for the fashion designer Kenzo in the 1980s, the women hadn’t seen each other in more than a decade. “We had re-found each other,” Taillac says. “Here, in Jaipur!”

All in tents

A few years ago, another European transplant, hotelier Barbara Miolini, asked Oudejans to design Bar Palladio Jaipur, Narain Niwas’s Italian-cuisine restaurant and bar. Inspired by the opulent lifestyles of the maharajas of the early 20th century, Oudejans came up with a colourful fantasia of mirrored salons framed by murals of exotic fowl and crowned by tented ceilings. Soon, she was creating chaises longues for the pool area and installing wrought-iron daybeds there, too, tented for respite from the sun. “I hadn’t thought about doing interiors, but Barbara gave me this opportunity,” Oudejans says. “And it was so much fun. I wanted to keep doing it.”

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The kitchen walls and ceiling were painted by Soni; Oudejans reupholstered the existing seats with fabric from Surabhi Exports, a local studio.

Oudejans designed the console below the 18th-century mirror

Then Oudejans learned that hotel management wanted to repaint her suite. “I thought, ‘Let’s change the colours and make it look more like me,’” she says. She called on artisans who had worked on Bar Palladio to build a clutch of consoles, had painters create Mughal-style flower murals, and added a few gold mirrors and block-printed linens, which she had made locally. As she did for Bar Palladio, she had the apartment’s ceilings painted to look like tents and topped her beds with canopies. “My grandmother had tents in her garden in the Netherlands,” Oudejans explains. “She had them made for all her grandchildren, and we played in them.” Because of that, she says, “everything I do has tents.”

Oudejans’s bedroom—she dressed the bed in custom-made fabrics

Oudejans found so much satisfaction in her decorating projects that she took on a few more, including homes in India and a bar-restaurant in New York. All are imbued with the same dreamy decadence associated with Indian royalty. Not surprisingly, Oudejans quickly developed a reputation as the Jaipur equivalent of Bill Willis, the Tennessee native who moved to Marrakech in the 1960s, became buddies with everyone from the Rothschilds to the Rolling Stones to Yves Saint Laurent, and established himself as that city’s most important aesthete, conjuring up mansions and restaurants in an extravagant hyper-Moorish vein.

Aedo, Oudejans’s Border collie, rests in the stencilled dressing room

Between September and March, Oudejans’s social calendar in Jaipur thrives. “We meet people from all over the world who pass through the hotel. The property is like a little jewel, and everybody gathers in the garden in the evening. I have made some great friends—a lot of expats from Italy and France, who are here because of the jewellery and fabric businesses,” the decorator says.

“It’s been quite a change from living in Paris and New York. Jaipur offers me a very different life—very inspiring, so many things to see every single day.” But when the sweltering heat and torrential monsoons arrive, Oudejans retreats to Europe. “We complain a lot here—about the weather, the craziness in the streets,” she confesses. “But when you leave, you miss it. India gets to you. If I lived anywhere else, I would not be so happy.”